Happy New Year!

Settling into 2026

I hope everyone had a fine Holiday and that your New Year’s resolutions are still being followed! One of my favorite ways of staying in shape is swimming. The local YMCA is just down the hill from my house and 40-50 minutes in the pool followed by 20-30 minutes in the steam room and sauna do wonders. This time of year, however, I avoid it like the plague. It seems a quarter of Nashville is waiting for a lane in the pool and the steam room is packed even in the standing area so it’s a little uncomfortable and a lot of time consumption. Some years the crowding has gotten so bad that they were offering valet parking for the guests, which seemed a bit ironic if you are trying to get back into shape. By mid-February, I can usually get back to my routine. I am not mocking the folks that give up, it’s a reality for all of us. There are plenty of resolutions I have never met. I was joking with a friend of mine that all I had to do was cross out 2025 and put in 2026 on my resolution list and I’d be done.

New year, new challenges. One of my personal habits that I have maintained for many years is the practice of journaling. I find it a great way to keep my sanity, throw ideas around, sketch poems and essays and blow off steam. I use the Leuchtturm 1917 Hardcover Medium and love it. It comes with two book mark ribbons, so I split the book in half. The front half is for my calendar notes, to do’s and fitness logs. The back half is where I journal, sketch, hatch ideas and generally scribble. A lot of the material on this website stems from those notebooks. I like that the unpronounceable notebook also features a couple of index pages up front so I can quickly find what I am looking for. I have tried electronic journaling with a couple of different products, but nothing is as satisfying as the analog pen and paper. The Leuchtturm’s paper is also high grade, so it handles my favorite writing instrument, the fountain pen very well. The Moleskine notebooks are very nice, but they have only one bookmark, and the ink tends to bleed through. With thinner paper, the ink isn’t absorbed as quickly so if you are a left hander like me and your hand is circled around the pen, you end up with a blue blur on the page and a very bad looking tattoo on your hand.

This year will be my 50th High School reunion year. We were the Bicentennial Class and proud of it. I graduated from high school in Brazil. It was an international school but attended mostly by Americans and Canadians, so it was fun that we got to do this with the yearbook:

The school was Escola Maria Imaculada, but we went by “Chapel.” The sports teams were the Trojans, thus the Aeneid for the yearbook. I had a lovely two years there and the very unusual nature of coming from there made me a curiosity for college admissions people, much to my advantage! But the addition of that 50-years means that this is the 250th Birthday of the founding of our country and should be cause for great celebration. Despite the rancor of the last, I don’t know, 10? 20? years, we are still the last best hope for freedom in the world.

In my Introduction to Real Estate Finance course that I teach at Vanderbilt’s business school, in the last class before their final presentations, I give what some have called “the life lecture.” It’s about a 25-minute PowerPoint and I share with them my observations on what it takes to be successful in our industry, but more importantly, I share with them my observations on what a life well lived should look like. I was very busy this year and didn’t have a lot of time to edit the presentation. About halfway in I have a slide that features this:

When it showed up on the screen I commented that perhaps this had gotten dated and I should take it out. I had put it in the deck during the Covid fiasco. I riffed on how the message should apply to how we speak to each other in the political realm, how tribal we have become. After class, several of my students came up and told me that I needed to keep that slide in - the message really resonated with them. Never lose your humanity is a message we all need to hear. I share all of this in the context of a project I have been working on that I plan to bring to these pages in the weeks ahead.

In 1973, Eric Sloane published a small book that alas is out of print. It’s title was “The Spirits of ‘76” and it was meant to be a wake up call as we approached our bicentennial. “The Spirits” is an evocative tribute to the enduring essence of American character. Sloane was also an illustrator, and each chapter included one of his prints - like this one:

The “spirits” were not ghosts, but a comparison of the early Americans and their modern (1970’s) day counterparts. The frugality of our founders was contrasted with the rampant consumerism of the time: “the early American was a maker not a buyer.” His thesis was the self-sufficient ethos of the 1700’s is what birthed our independence. There were essays on pioneering, hard work, thankfulness and (shudder) Godliness. I suspect it’s somewhat harsh indictment of the American character might be the reason it is out of print.

Now that we are in the year of our Semiquincentennial, or Bisesquicentennial if that is too much of a mouthful, I thought I would revisit some of those themes with some observations and contrasts with where we are now. All in the spirit of trying to not lose our humanity, but we are very different. Americans in 1773 dumped British tea into Boston Harbor over a 3 pence per pound tax. Today, we pay on average, 29.2% of our income in various taxes and don’t batt an eye. Why is that? We tolerate intrusive regulations, routine invasions of our privacy, a world run by “experts” that have expertly gotten us into close to $40 Trillion in debt and we don’t talk about it. I intend to explore these themes and see where that exploration leads.

I would ask your thoughts, dear reader, on this project. What do you think has changed? What can we do to restore that sense of self-reliance? I look forward to interacting with you in the coming days and hopefully seeing this New Year’s resolution fulfilled.

Happy New Year and blessings to all!